In many of my recent presentations I’ve spoken about our Stackato vision and how it fulfills the needs of what IDC terms “The Third Platform.” (For more information about the Third Platform, see this cio.com blog post I wrote last year).

Many people recognize DevOps as an enormous benefit — faster application deployment, automated toolchains, support of more granular updates, better cooperation across groups. However, less appreciated is the journey enterprise IT groups need to make to achieve this outcome.

For most, creating a DevOps environment requires a new found coordination of Dev and IT that simply wasn’t part of the organization’s original Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). If you’re fortunate enough to move the organization’s development and release structure to a more symbiotic mode, the next step is to shoot for the DevOps’ apex or continuous deployment.

It is easy to look at the unicorn companies of our world, most notably Netflix, and say, "That's it! That's how we should be doing it". Whether it's DevOps or Microservices, they seem to have it nailed.

PaaS has been such a great innovation for developers. They can develop and deploy applications from their desktop to the cloud, all in a consistent environment. They can deploy to production themselves, bypassing the IT middleman and speeding up the application delivery process. And they can develop in any language they want, without limitations. Developers have it made! But what about IT?